How To Snare a Bachelor: A Guide to Seducing Hobbits
by withywillow
Summary: Young, innocent, and very naive, Poppy has no idea what she's getting herself into when she decides to woo Hobbiton's most famous and well-liked bachelor...Bilbo/OC, pre-movie/book events.


I know it's wrong, all of it! But I can't seem to help myself. Every time he comes around – donning his smart coat, buttons shining bright, hair the color of fine warm earth that crumbles so wonderfully through your fingers – my legs turn to jelly! My heart goes all aflutter no sooner do I spot his russet head bobbing through the throng on market day, sweet and pale and plump as a gentlehobbit ought to be; I can't seem to cease the awful throbbing in my chest when he comes near, and it never allays, not for a moment, until he's gone from my sight (I can't bring myself to mention what other parts of me he sets to aching with his mere presence, it would be very unladylike to do so).

He is ever polite, having been reared on good manners, and greets me first with 'good morning! Lovely day, isn't it?' before he turns his attention fully to the vegetables. He has his own way of going about the business, knitting his brow so sweetly as he deliberates his choices, and I've figured that mushrooms are his favorite by the way his hands always reach instinctively for them first. They are such _nimble_, capable hands that I can't help but wonder how they would feel on skin…

Oh, but these are _strange _feelings. I only wish I could decode them, or ask them questions, as they do not come with explanations - only infuriating mystery and bewilderment. They must mean _something. _Of course, I know I find him lovely and inviting and utterly divine, and this must be what causes these odd stirrings. It is quite the confounding little riddle, to say the very least, as I cannot quite figure how they manage to be both unpleasant and agreeable all at once. They settle in the pit of my belly, akin to the way mother's stew simmers at the bottom of her pewter cauldron. Slow and hot and rather uncomfortable when it bubbles just under the skin and starts to burn. I wish they would be gone! They are bothersome, and distracting, and I'm certain my cheeks have turned blazing scarlet in a most unbecoming fashion.

He's in the midst of considering a fair-sized onion when, without moving a muscle, he glances upward and finds me shamelessly gawking at him. Oh, _bother_, I've been caught. Mooning after him openly as if I were some ditzy half-wit! He must think me silly. Or even worse – _he knows my licentious thoughts._

"Are you quite all right?"

"Of course!" I squeak, struck quite breathless by the sound of his voice. At long last, he's spoken directly to me! And not about the weather at all, but a different topic entirely! And such a gentle and sensuos timbre of - _oh, _I think I might faint.

He's watching me very closely now, concern flooding his soft dewy cow eyes. "Why, you look as though you're going to faint!" He exclaims. "It is not too hot for you? Yes, of course, that must be what's ailing you. Perhaps it would be best if you had a sit down and rested, you poor girl…you look positively ashen! Come now..."

With a spritely kind of grace, he dashes round the cart and takes my hand and I am very nearly certain I have never been so happy in all my short life. Even happier than the first time I cooked eggs for mum - all by my lonesome mind you - and didn't burn them. And even more still than the morning I woke to find the first flowers I planted for the spring had bloomed in the night. This moment reigns triumphant over them all! Bilbo Baggins, handsomest bachelor in all of the Shire, holding my hand! And what's more, his arm is wrapped around my waist!

"_There." _He grins and instantaneously releases my hand. The giddiness recedes as quickly as it came. "A moment of rest will do you good, I think!" He holds up a finger, as if begging pardon, and begins hastily digging through the contents of his pockets. It is not very long before he finds what he is looking for – a pouch filled with coins, which he drops promptly, but most graciously, into the folds of my apron.

"Take care that you don't tire yourself," he says. "That's a good girl."

He pats me on the head, as if I were a _child_.

If he only knew how I ached for him! To hold his soft curls in my hands, touch that skin so pale, like fresh milk…Certainly, he would not think me a child then.

As I mournfully watch him depart with his basket of vegetables, slipping further and further away out of sigh, I heave a small sigh of resignation. I know what it is I must do.

"I'm going to seduce him…it's the only way." I whisper to myself, and blush hotly as I realize I've said the words aloud.

If only I knew how!


End file.
